


Ghosts

by Thimblerig



Series: On the Decks of La Sirena [13]
Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Difficult Relationships, Flashbacks, Gen, Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:55:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23787445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: La Sirena'sEmergency Holograms disappeared when the ship was eaten by an orchid, their systems overwhelmed by the power drain.Fortunately, Cris knows an expert in raising the dead...
Relationships: Agnes Jurati/Cristóbal Rios, Cristóbal Rios & La Sirena's Emergency Holograms
Series: On the Decks of La Sirena [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1634554
Comments: 89
Kudos: 58





	1. flawed and fractious

_O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us  
_ _To see oursels as ithers see us!_

(Robert Burns, 1786)

“Hilarious as it was for a civilian and a retiree to pootle this ship through a pitched space battle like a, a mini in a fleet of heavy-duty haulers, Enoch’s moral support would have been just darling.”

Agnes’s voice is muffled, half-buried as she is in the eviscerated underbelly of one of the Ops consoles. Cris can only see her legs poking out, muffled in the oversized khakis she’d borrowed from his closet when they first hit Coppelius and its baking heat. The cuffs are folded several times for length and a fine darn in the right leg that the damned fussy EHH had stitched instead of replicating a replacement is just visible where the fading Coppelius sunlight angles through the ship. Cris sits on the floor beside her and wonders when - if - he’ll get his pants back. Perhaps they will smell of her by then. Hmm. 

“I’m not making any promises,” the little doctor says, squirming and shuffling. She settles again with a sigh, one knee cocked up and the baggy trouser leg pulling back to show a slender ankle. “Hologrammic science is far from my specialty. Audited a couple of courses. Filled in some blank time at a conference. I’m not… good at this.”

“Anything is better than what I can do, Doc,” Cris confesses. “I only ever edited the Emergency Holograms when I was drunk.”

“That explains the Escher architecture,” he hears her mutter.

“You looked at their code before?”

She hesitates. “Yes.”

Cris thinks back over the timeline of a busy month. It was probably before Freecloud, he considers: they were so desperately busy after and then Agnes was - distracted and then indisposed. 

He wonders what _not good_ means in the context of _Earth's leading expert on synthetic life._ He wonders how many backdoors and coding hacks the little doctor picked up on the conference circuit, drinking in bars after presentations or, or little tea parties with pastry forks - whatever they’re doing in academia these days. And he wonders _just how badly_ Agnes could have fucked them all over when she was still The Mole, if she’d really been trying… From her silence, he thinks Agnes is wondering that too.

He covers her ankle with his hand and squeezes lightly. “I always fall for the smart ones,” he tells her softly, and feels the woman relax. 

A flicker of static. “How about now?” she asks, muffled under the wiring.

“No, nothing,” Cris answers, looking out over the Operations deck. It is empty, quiet, still. The electrostatic ghosts she has been chasing with the Super-Synths’ field replicator wand are stubbornly silent. 

She squirms again, knocks against something. “Ow ow ow!” Static. “Anything?” she asks hopefully.

“Nada,” Cris sighs, tilting his head back against the hardness of the Ops console. Not once in these hours of tedious work has Agnes suggested restoring Cris’s Sound and Light Crew from the source code and doing them over. He’s not sure how to feel about that. (It’s not as if he _likes_ the Emergency Holograms, a stopgap solution always, barely preferable to having a live crew. But they’re _his,_ fractious and flawed as they are.)

It’s late: the little doctor must be tired. _Save what you can save._ He should give over -

There is another leg beside him, clad in dun-coloured trousers, sitting quietly in the Ops seat. Cris looks up: there’s a Hologram at the controls. His hair is neater than Cris’s, though the beard has more salt in it. He sits upright, poised, like a polite child. “Enoch?” Cris whispers, voice cracking.

“Aye, Cap’n,” the ENH says.

But this Enoch is looking away from Cris, his head craned back to the Captain’s chair. It is a ghost, only.

Cris stares, transfixed, as the ENH above him turns back to the controls. His eyes look so _bright_ from this angle; the fall of the tangerine Coppelius light makes him look so young. Enoch stares straight ahead and his mouth curls in a little smile. “Straight on ‘til morning,” the Hologram murmurs, even as he shimmers away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoiler: He's not getting the pants back.


	2. a kind of salmon

Cris swallows hard. He squeezes Agnes’s ankle. “Did - you hear that?” he says.

“Mm-hhm,” she says, muffled in the guts of the machinery. Then, without irony, she adds, “Yay!”

Cris laughs softly.

In the shadows at the far end of the Operations deck the Engineering EMH bends over the JK-391 fluctuator, fine-tuning the balky thing one more time. When he’s done he stands, hands on hips, looking down at it with satisfaction before nodding briefly, snapping his fingers above his head, and vanishing. Cris squeezes her ankle again.

“‘m going to try a lower quadrant,” the little doctor says, and jumps as she zaps herself. Cris looks out into the expanse of the ship, through the sunlight and the dustmotes, and sees, at the top of the stairs, the back of the Hospitality Hologram, his arms cradling something out of sight.

“Surprise!” the Hologram declares. “Guaranteed neutered!”

In the silence that follows, Agnes asks, “Do I… want to know what that’s about?”

“He tried to bring a Tribble aboard,” Cris explains. 

Agnes shudders delicately. “You know those things are omnivores, right?”

“Exactly! Ugh!”

“You don’t like pets?” the Hologram says sadly, and vanishes.

“He was a bit… one note,” Cris says, almost apologetically, then flinches as the ship rings with a piercing counter-tenor phrase from the second duet of  _ Aktuh and Maylota. _ He feels, but does not hear, the bump as Agnes hits her head. Emil sings on, unaware, hands lightly gripping the rail as he roars out notes of love and rage in the original Klingon, pausing only to catch the thread flung by an absent partner.

“That… that was…”

Cris sighs gustily, rubbing his eyes. “They were always so proud of getting the gutturals right.” 

“He never gets any nicer,” declares Emil, standing by the other Ops chair, his hands tangled with a tray of medical paraphernalia.

“That’s fair,” Cris tells the vanishing EMH.

There’s a nudge against his leg - Agnes’s slender ankle bumping against him. He covers it again with his hand.

A zap, and Agnes flinches under his hand. In a shimmer of dust motes, the Emergency Tactical Hologram paces along, one arm held out. Even under the bulky vest that Emmet wears his back is very straight, his shaggy head high. He walks with focus and controlled power, then stops, turns, and his right arm curves around at chest height.

“What  _ is _ that?” Cris breathes, watching the Hologram step and turn, step and turn, arms always poised and his gaze fixed and intent on something Cris is not privy to. “Ba Gua?”

“Isn’t that a kind of salmon?” Agnes asks, worried.

Suddenly a little backwards kick of the foot reframes itself in Cris’s eyes. “Emmet, you  _ dog.”  _ He grins sardonically. “Who are you dancing  _ tango _ with,  _ Emmet?” _

The Hologram does not answer. His knees bend in a dip, still controlled, supporting his partner with power, poise, and focussed intensity… and then all that remains are the motes of dust and sunlight.

Silence.

“It’s fine,” says the Steward, the self-dubbed ‘Mr Hospitality’. He is sitting at one of the Ops stations, where he should  _ never _ be, has no  _ reason _ to be. “We’re all fine here.” The EHH pauses to smooth his hand over his annoyingly shiny hair. Brightly, he coos, “How’re you?”

“What,” says Cris.

“He sounds chirpy,” Agnes volunteers. “How about…” With a spark Mr Hospitality vanishes.

“I urge you not to try my patience,” says Emil, in musical, mannered, menacing tones that Cris is regrettably familiar with. But -

The EMH sprawls in the Captain’s chair loose-jointed as a lounging wolf, and tilts his head back, smiling with all his teeth. One eye glints with cold amusement. The other is hidden by a black leather eyepatch. _ “What?” _ says Cris.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _“Who are you dancing tango with, Emmet?”_ \- I used this tango rehearsal as a reference: https://vimeo.com/270526954 Which may be the answer you need, come to think of it...
> 
> // I borrowed the name _Aktuh and Maylota_ from a list of Klingon operas in Memory Alpha, though I can't honestly tell you what it's about.


	3. this never happened

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Turns out this one is a four-parter.
> 
> Nearly there!

“I urge you not to try my patience,” Emil says, ensconced with languid menace in the Captain’s chair.

_ “What?” _ says Cris. He raises himself to his feet to watch from a better angle as the EMH shifts his head a half-centimetre of studied insolence.

“Explaining our crewman’s disappearance to Mother weighs marginally more in my mind than the prospect of a larger share of the profit,” the EMH drawls, snapping the last T, to what is now the bare rocks and sand of Coppelius.  _ “Marginally.” _

“I don’t remember this. At all.”

Cris prowls around the chair even as the EMH glances to one of the Ops stations. “Yes, Emmet,” Emil soothes. “He  _ is _ a little moody.” He looks back to the front window, “So it’s decided, then!” he adds brightly, reaching for a control, then pauses and says, almost reluctantly, “I’m glad we could come to this agreement.  _ Chow.” _

A pause. Then Emil turns in his seat, craning around to see the transporter platform, says,  _ “Shit,” _ and fades even as he scrambles out of the chair.

Cris stares at the transporter pad with shocked disbelief.

“Those lying  _ liars,” _ he says at last. “They told me it was Fenris Rangers got my scrawny ass away from the pirates. And they were playing dress-up instead?!”

He looks around the silent vault of his ship for more answers. He can hear Agnes cackling to herself inside the machinery.

“The Fenris Rangers were  _ cool,” _ he mutters, feeling sulky and petulant.

He supposes, in the aftermath of that debacle, he would have believed anything - half off his head with fever and flattened to the bed with a punctured lung, he’d believed one night old Vandermeer was sitting beside the bed, reading poetry aloud as a tube down Cris’s throat breathed for him,  _ that’s _ how out of it he was.

“Your ass is not scrawny,” Agnes says.

“Thank you, that makes all of it better.”

“What is the nature of the medical emergency?” Emil says brightly,  _ sans _ eyepatch now, hands in the pockets of his coat. He vanishes, and appears on the stairway down: “What is the nature of the medical emergency?”

Static.

“What is the nature of the medical emergency?”

Static.

Emil appears by the transporter pad, addresses an unknown speaker, and then makes his leisurely way to the front of the ship. “... What seems to be the problem…?” He always did have a gift for passive-aggression, that one. Cris would be proud, if he were not so frequently the target.

“What is the nature of the psychiatric emergency?” the EMH says, appearing by the rail. “Captain, your blood cortisol is -”

“What is the nature of the psychiatric em-"

“What is the nat-”

Static.

Emil kneels on the floor, hand outstretched. “Captain.  _ Cristobál. _ Breathe with me. One. Two. Three.”

Cris watches dispassionately.

Somehow, in all this recent chaos - the crisis, or getting answers, or just talking it out with Raffi - he’s lost the shame he used to feel, the disgust at himself for  _ breaking _ so thoroughly when, after all, what had  _ he _ done? Only been an attendant at the sacrifice.

“That’s good,” says Emil, coffee-dark eyes intent. “One more br-”

Silence.

“You okay?” asks Agnes. 

He touches her foot with his own. “Yeah,” he says, and means it.

She clicks something inside the machinery and suddenly Ian and Enoch are there, the Engineering Hologram sitting on Navigation’s shoulders, teetering in an uneasy tower that just barely reaches some circuitry in the wall. “Steady, lad,” Ian calls, before they both topple, laughing, into nothingness.

There is another eidolon prancing along the side of the deck, flouncing around with a little Hologram feather duster as a prop. 

The Steward stops suddenly, looks down, and with hands on hips declares, “Some of us use  _ chairs.” _

“I think I have enough?” Agnes says, softly muffled.

“No,” Cris breathes, “wait.”

This never happened. Not to Cris. He watches silently as Mr Hospitality sighs with excessive drama and then folds himself up to sit on the floor, resting against a gear box. He drapes his arm across invisible shoulders and says, the Spanish oddly shaped in his mouth,  _ “Yo lo sé. Tienes triste.” _ His hand curls up to tilt a tired head to rest against his own.

Cris moves to crouch in front of the EHH, studying the cradle of the strong arms, the weariness of eyes usually obscured by shiny hair and obnoxious moustaches. They stay that way for long minutes, until a shimmer of light and dust breaks the spell.

“Okay,” Cris says uncertainly. “Let’s do this.”

Under the Ops console Agnes scrambles and squirms, and then says, still muffled, “Um, can you pull me out?”

He chuckles, and walks over to wrap his hands around her slender ankles. She is rumpled and reeking when he has hauled her out, both her hands clasped about the alien seashell curves of the field replicator, her over-sized khakis and black singlet sweaty, and her cheeks flushed fever-bright and dusty. She beams bright as the sun. “Help me up?”

“Not yet.” Cris props himself on an elbow and bends over her. They kiss, slow and sweet and comfortable, and it is only when they are good and ready that they help each other stand, hands lingering.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _He is a little moody_ \- I borrowed the phrase from ep 1.10 of _The Musketeers_ because I like the classics.
> 
> // There was some chatter that turned up on Tumblr among @talvenhenki, @ncthingstars, @cristobalrios, and @enigma-the-mysterious, about how _maybe_ Emmet is so tired all the time because he has a portion of Rios’s depression. And _maybe_ Mr Hospitality’s lack-of-personal space and constant desire to tidy things up might lead him to clash with Emmet, but also make him prone to hugging out the sads. _When no-one can see._
> 
> It really stuck with me.


	4. an incantation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Done! Finito! I hope you enjoy!

“I kinda feel like there needs to be an incantation…” Cris mutters.

The white walls and floor of the Medbay are bright and stark compared with the functional steel bulkheads of the rest of the ship, and the overhead lights shine without shadows over the table that Agnes had commandeered for her work. 

There are long data-cables running from the medical scanner to the table, and to the synaptic transceiver crown on Cris’s head, and trailing snake-like out of the Medbay to other parts of the ship. What’s on the table looks like the machinations of a mad genius who had only a back shed to work in, repurposed gadgets and hardware borrowed from Coppelus Station and in the middle a not-strictly-legal bioneural gelpack, a clear cylinder full of precisely measured quantities of proteins and fats, all lit up by the uneasy glow of the fractal wiring inside. Beside it glint the doubled silver rings of Soji’s necklace, lent to them for luck.

Agnes lifts the magic w- the _field replicator,_ and with a glint of amusement in her eyes, says, _“Habeas corpus, bibidi bobidi bu,”_ touches it to one of the gadgets wired up on the table, and waits.

Cris waits.

The light is too stark here. There is no room for sunlight and dustmotes.

The little doctor bites her lip, touches it again. Shifts her grip in the finger-holes of the field replicator. Again.

“Please state the nature of the medical emergency.”

It’s no-one Cris knows stepping out of the air - a middle-aged man, balding and peevish, in old-fashioned Starfleet blues. He looks at them like he’s sucking a lemon, then flickers into a plump woman with grey at the temples of her fox-coloured hair. She smiles warmly and says, “Please state the nature of the -” 

An austere Vulcan that Cris vaguely remembers as the preset form of the EMH stares down his nose at them, crow’s-feet in his walnut-brown skin. “State your medical emer -”

A small, furry humanoid in ‘Fleet blues says something unintelligible -

“What is the nature of the medical emergency?”

The EMH stands there, _his_ EMH, with his hands neatly tucked in the pockets of his long coat. “Emil?” Agnes says uncertainly.

The EMH looks at them blandly. “I can answer to that name if you like. How can I help you? My scanners do not detect any injury or illness. Are you here for health counselling?” His eyes stray to the paraphernalia on the table, to the wiring that Cris is a part of. “Or perhaps, a science project.”

Agnes asks, “Are you satisfied with your condition?”

The EMH’s eyes flash blue-silver. After a moment, he says, “My systems are functional.” Cris glances at Agnes and her face is terrifyingly bland. He looks away, to the white wall, to nothingness, as the EMH continues, “Although there are some anomalies in my personal memory files. Defragmentation might be in order for optimum performance.”

 _Save what you can save,_ Cris hears old Vandermeer say. Solid advice, and yet…

“I really did want to know about the eyepatch,” he says out loud.

He hears a shuffle, looks back. The EMH looks… shifty, even as the blue-silver light flickers again through his eyes. 

Agnes raises her wispy eyebrows. “Can I... hear about the eyepatch…?” she says, eyes round.

The Hologram hesitates. “I needed to look sketchy,” he says. “To match with Captain Rios’s… general aesthetic standard.” 

Cris snorts.

“Are you satisfied with your condition?” Agnes says again. It has the air of a ritual phrase.

Emil’s eyes crinkle at the corners. “I am… worried. At the pair of you. Have I been away?” He frowns. “Did something happen?”

Muffled, overhead, they hear the Emergency Engineering Hologram’s roar: _“Engines are losing power, Cap’n, full system drain!”_ followed by a confused, _“Och, ne'er mynd, they're gey weel noo.”_

Cris feels his shoulder sag, his eyes prickle. He lifts one hand to scrub roughly at them as he stands and says, “In Medbay, activate all Emergency Holograms.”

Ian appears, his knitted cap askew, along with Enoch, eyes bright as he looks around the stark white room, the arcane and erratic gadgetry.

_“Oye, capitán.”_

Emmet sits in a corner, slouched, tattooed, and villainous. He waves a lazy finger, then looks at Agnes, brightens, and says, _“Hola, brujita.”_ The flirt.

Agnes grins back and says carefully, “ _Buenas noches, cariño.”_

Also a flirt.

Someone shoves against Cris from behind - all his breath is knocked out of his lungs even as steely arms wrap around his ribs and squeeze. He does a quick headcount - Emmet in the chair, Emil touching Agnes’s shoulder very lightly, Ian and Enoch looking about in wonder. That leaves…

“Steward,” Cris sighs. 

“‘Mr Hospitality’ is fine too,” the EHH mumbles, muffled by his face being buried in Cris’s shoulder-blades.

Cris… hesitates. It’s hard to breathe, and he feels ridiculous with the synaptic transceiver crown still dangling wires from his head. Gingerly he lays his hand over the EHH’s phantom wrist, and squeezes.

This part, too, is his. 

“Welcome back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _a not-strictly-legal bioneural gelpack_ \- these came up a fair bit in Voyager - units that provide extra computer processing with “grey” logic capabilities. So, highly useful if you have a capital ship that needs a lot of computer time. That said, the things can catch viruses from _cheese_ and die, can’t be replicated, absorb both chronitonic and psionic energy, and are just weird little fuckers.
> 
> They also figure in _The Last Best Hope,_ the tie-in novel by Una McCormack, as the basis of the Mars synths’ brains. So… something that Agnes would have familiarity with, and quite likely something that would be noted in the synth ban. Hence, “not-quite-legal”. 
> 
> // _bibidi bobidi bu_ \- is a phrase from a song in the Disney adaptation of Cinderella. It doesn’t mean much, other than casting magic in a happy way. 
> 
> // _Habeas corpus_ \- is a legal term which literally means “produce the body”.
> 
> // _a middle-aged man, balding and peevish, in old-fashioned Starfleet blues_ \- "Three Ficlets of Family" by Curator played with the idea of Voyager’s EMH Mk 1 sticking around in the source code of the later models, and the idea stuck with.
> 
> // _“Hola, brujita.”/“Buenas noches, cariño.”_ \- “Hello, little witch.”/“Good evening, dear.” (One of the Spanish sources I looked up said that “brujita” could also be a teasing reference to one’s girlfriend. The flirt.)


End file.
